TIP's configurable transport service

Due to the emergence of sophisticated distributed systems and high-speed networks, some insufficiencies have become apparent in currently provided service capabilities and performance of conventional transport systems. New services are required which support gigabit applications with high throughput, remote procedure calls with low service latency, conferencing with multipoint associations or interactive audio/video communications with real-time transport qualities. Providing the new required services with the existing connection-oriented or connectionless services is in most cases insufficient because of poor performance results or missing capabilities. Also, defining dedicated services for each new application class in order to achieve optimal support may lead to an unfavorably large set of service definitions and consequently to an immense number of protocols and protocol variants. Our approach presented in this paper provides a concept for a configurable transport service which mostly subsumes existing and newly required services. This new transport service is part of the TIP (Transport and Internetworking Package) project.<<ETX>>